Clem Seecharan


Clem Seecharan is a writer and historian of the Indo-Caribbean experience, and of West Indies cricket, who was born in Guyana and has been based in England since 1986.

Life and career

Seecharan grew up in East Berbice-Corentyne, and attended the Sheet Anchor Anglican School, the Berbice Educational Institute, and Queen’s College in Guyana. He studied at McMaster University in Canada, and taught Caribbean Studies at the University of Guyana for some years, before completing his doctorate in History at the University of Warwick in 1990. He joined the staff of the University of North London, where he was head of Caribbean studies since 1994, and was awarded a professorship in 2002. He is formally retired, having last taught on the Caribbean Studies programme at London Metropolitan University.
Seecheran continues educational and advocacy work informally, as in his recent contribution to a discussion on the legacy of former Guyanese Marxist leader Cheddi Jagan, hosted by the Guyanese High Commission in London on March 28, 2018.

Publications

A distinguished Caribbean historian, Seecharan is the author of publications that include Indo-West Indian Cricket, India and the Shaping of the Indo-Guyanese Imagination: 1890-1920 and Indians in British Guiana 1919-1929. In 2005 his biography of Jock Campbell, Sweetening Bitter Sugar: Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer in British Guiana 1934-1966 was published and won the Elsa Gouveia Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians, their citation describing it as "an extraordinarily impressive book of signal importance in Caribbean history and historiography." His most recent book, Muscular Learning: Cricket and Education in the Making of the British West Indies at the End of the 19th Century, was published in 2006.